Jorge said:
Does that someone (a developer) sometimes turns it off prove
anything ?
It proves that "in the very near future" at least one person will be
happy to disable the ECMAScript engine in their browser, except for
trusted sites. It proves that your "secret" is an exaggeration with
nothing to substantiate it. An article of faith, in other words.
How many web surfers know how to turn it off or even what it is ?
Apparently somewhere around 55 million browsers have NoScript
installed. Chances are those represent more than a handful of users.
And that's just one way of disabling scripting.
Not that you've shown *why* the number of users with scripting
disabled matters to your claim.
That IEs are so vulnerable is your argument (Why does M$ don't want us
to use it ?) ?
Where did I mention IE?
Are Safaris or Chromes or FiereFoxes or Operas as vulnerable as IEs ?
For this purpose, who cares?
You want some more of the form-comes form-goes tired-old web model ?
Yes.
Because the web must move forward, right ?
No. There's nothing that requires "the web" (a facile abstraction in
any case) to "move forward" (also a facile abstraction).
Will developers continue to create web pages using novel technologies
and techniques? It seems likely they will, until something changes
radically, because that's the sort of thing people do. But that
probable fact does not impose any burden on me, or anyone else, as a
developer or as a user. It does not require me to add scripting to any
of my web pages; it does not require me to use the scripts on pages I
visit.
It certainly doesn't require I subscribe to your religion about the
glorious inevitability of ubiquitous scripting.
What's in your opinion that will make it happen ?
I don't know, and I don't particularly care. In IT, prediction is a
fool's game. I'll critique it as it appears on the scene.
Javascript's like the (Phoenix) "fire bird".
That metaphor is irrelevant to my claim. I didn't say ECMAScript would
disappear; I said that predicting everyone would be forced to use it
was like other similar, incorrect predictions of the past.
Once programming languages reach a decent (in some handwaving sense)
degree of penetration in mainstream IT, they never seem to go away.
COBOL, FORTRAN (now Fortran), and LISP are all still used for
real-world development. So is BASIC, if you accept VB as a BASIC
variant. Processor families come and go, but there are still people
writing in assembly for various current families.
ECMAScript is a fine language, and client-side scripting is fine. But
when you create a page that requires scripting, you're imposing a
constraint on your users that will not magically disappear in a year
because all browsers everywhere will then be executing all scripts in
every page they load.
I've written pages that required scripting; but they were ECMAScript
applications, and they were for a limited audience - often a handful
of scholars I know personally. That audience has no reason to use
those pages except to run those applications, and they would only run
those applications out of an interest in what the applications do.
Requiring scripting in those cases is not an encumbrance on a page
that a user might want or need to use for some other purpose.
Just today I tried to sign on to a commercial site to check the status
of an order. Their sign-on page requires scripting. Why? Because the
form is rejected if their client-side validation script hasn't run
(regardless of the fact that, as we all know, client-side validation
can be helpful for users but is useless for the server, since it's
entirely under the user's control). That's a page written by an idiot
who believes that all users will have scripting enabled.
